THIS WEEK 29 April 1995
Cherry red and very dangerous
By Rob Edwards
“RED MERCURY”, a uniquely powerful chemical explosive which has been dismissed by many experts as a myth, could be real, and it could pose a serious threat to the world’s attempts to control the spread of nuclear weapons. New information leaked from South Africa, Russia and the US has convinced leading nuclear weapons scientists that the chemical’s potential risks should now be taken seriously.
The scientists, who include Sam Cohen, the American nuclear physicist who invented the neutron bomb, and Frank Barnaby, the former director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, are worried that red mercury could make it much easier for nations or terrorist groups to construct small but deadly thermonuclear fusion weapons. They are calling for the 178-nation conference on the future of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, due to end in New York in two weeks, to introduce tougher controls on the international trade in tritium, one of the raw materials of the fusion bomb.
“I don’t want to sound melodramatic,” says Cohen, who worked on the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb in the 1940s and was a nuclear weapons adviser to the US government with the Rand Corporation for 20 years. “But red mercury is real and it is terrifying. I think it is part of a terrorist weapon that potentially spells the end of organised society.” He claims that it could be used to make a baseball-sized neutron bomb capable of killing everyone within about 600 metres of the explosion.
Barnaby, a respected nuclear weapons analyst who has been investigating red mercury for the past six years, is more cautious. He accepts that there have been many cases in which offers of red mercury for sale at enormous prices have turned out to be hoaxes. But he believes “on the balance of probabilities” that a mercury-based high explosive which could revolutionise the design of nuclear weapons was developed within the former Soviet Union.
The latest evidence Barnaby has seen is two documents leaked to Greenpeace, apparently from a former mercury production plant in South Africa. The documents detail chemical specifications for a substance called “red mercury 20:20”; a compound of pure mercury and mercury antimony oxide (Hg2Sb2O7) described as “cherry red” and “semi-liquid”. The documents seem to form part of a request from an unknown buyer for the supply of “4-10 flasks per month” of the substance.
One of the documents, dated 2 April 1990, is addressed to Wolfgang Dolich at the British-owned Thor Chemical company at Speyer, near Mannheim in Germany. Dolich, who was a sales manager at the time and is now the company’s German director, could not remember who had sent him the document, nor could he decipher whose illegible signature it bears. But he thinks the document is likely to be one of the many requests that he used to receive for mercury products. He says that he probably passed it on to his company’s sister plant at Cato Ridge in Natal, South Africa, where mercury compounds were manufactured until a few years ago.
But Dolich told New Scientist that nothing could have come of the request because Thor, which runs chemicals businesses in seven countries from its headquarters in Margate, Kent, had never been involved in the manufacture of red mercury.
The document also contains a handwritten note saying “Herewith all we have on red mercury” and signed “Alan”. Dolich thinks this is likely to be Alan Kidger, Thor’s Johannesburg-based sales director who was mysteriously murdered in November 1991. South African police investigators believe that Kidger’s murder could be linked to a clandestine trade in red mercury, although the company denies this.
Barnaby regards the specifications in the documents as scientifically credible, although they are not always easy to understand. They are similar to others he has seen from Russia, Germany and Austria and reinforce his view that there is a significant international trade in red mercury. In association with two other senior scientists from Italy and the US, whom he declined to name, he is now actively trying to acquire a small sample of red mercury so that its alleged properties can be properly tested in a laboratory.
Barnaby’s group has talked to four unnamed scientists in Russia. Barnaby says all four provided detailed information about red mercury. As a result Barnaby has concluded that it is a polymer with a gel-like consistency in which mercury and antimony have been bound together after irradiation for up to 20 days in a nuclear reactor.
He says that mercury antimony oxide is produced in “relatively large quantities” at a chemicals factory in Yekaterinburg. Red mercury itself, he claims, was first produced in 1965 in a cyclotron at the nuclear research centre at Dubna, near Moscow, and is now made at “a number” of Russian military centres, including Krasnoyarsk in Siberia and Penza, 500 kilometres southeast of Moscow. One Russian scientist estimates that Russia produces about 60 kilograms of red mercury a year.
Barnaby argues that the gel, as well as having possible uses in fission weapons, could yield enough chemical energy when compressed to fuse tritium atoms and produce a thermonuclear explosion. The gel may already be incorporated in Russian neutron weapons, such as the M-1975 240-millimetre mortar, he says.
If this is true, red mercury would be a remarkable material which could have dramatic implications for energy production as well as weapons technology. But its existence is doubted, not just by the British, US and German governments (This Week, 6 June 1992), but also by independent critics. Two of the most notable are Joseph Rotblat, emeritus professor of physics at the University of London, and Ted Taylor, a leading bomb designer at the US nuclear weapons laboratory at Los Alamos in New Mexico in the 1950s.
Taylor points out that the only conceivable way to obtain the high levels of chemical energy claimed for red mercury would be to dislodge the inner electrons of mercury and antimony. But he argues that it is difficult to see how this could produce a substance that was stable long enough to be used as an explosive. “I would bet that it does not exist,” he says.
Despite his scepticism, Taylor believes that the potential implications of red mercury are so significant that it ought to be investigated. The discovery of a material that could release hundreds or thousands of times more chemical energy than TNT could be “more important than nuclear fission”, he says. It could revolutionise space travel as well as making possible a fearsome new category of nuclear fusion weapons. “I hope it’s all wrong, but maybe I’m slipping into wishful thinking,” he says. He agrees with Barnaby and Cohen that trade in tritium ought to be subject to the same safeguards as plutonium and highly enriched uranium, the essential ingredients of fission bombs.
Cohen, however, claims that red mercury is one of a new class of highly explosive materials under secret investigation by nuclear weapons scientists in the US. He quotes a memorandum which he received recently from Sandia National Laboratories, the nuclear weapons engineering centre in New Mexico, which describes such materials as “ballotechnic”. According to the memo, this means that “under certain conditions” the chemical energy obtained “can be greater than with high explosives”.
Bob Graham, a senior researcher at Sandia, says that he coined the term “ballotechnics” to describe devices which produce heat following exposure to shock. But he insists that it has no connection with red mercury, which he does not believe exists. “Graham is not free to speak openly about this,” counters Cohen. “I am.” (see Diagram)
Make-up of red mercury fusion bomb
Red Mercury is the answer to how the Russians made it through America's security for WTC-93, OKC-95 and 9-11. And, why evidence of chemical explosives were not found in the WTC 93 and OKC [1]. These bombs were the counter to the roll out of SDI which took place during the 1970's. This is the time the Soviets manufactured these weapons, according to GRU defector Stanislav Lunev. This is also in line with the 1975 establishment of the Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST).
1. https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9704a/04wtc97.htm
Witness Says Expert Lied At Bomb Trial (Published 2004). (2004). Retrieved 28 May 2021, from https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/20/us/witness-says-expert-lied-at-bomb-trial.html
No comments:
Post a Comment